Monday 16 January 2012

Picking Partners

Is the John Lewis Partnership excellent in many, many ways? Yes, of course so. Is the John Lewis Partnership a model for, say, Job Centres? No, of course not.

Among the many conservative principles that worker representatives would articulate would be the priority of the family and the local community, together with a patriotism which includes economic patriotism, itself including both tight controls on capital movement and tight controls on immigration. Integral to national sovereignty, including to national security, are a strong manufacturing base, control of our own food and fuel supplies, and the ownership of our industries and enterprises by our own citizens. As representatives from the floor would understand.

Such representation is one of several German features that we urgently need to adopt. Others are regional banking with close ties to the agricultural and manufacturing sectors; small and medium-sized family businesses on the Mittelstand model; and vocational as well as general skills training, accorded the same respect as a very high level of academic achievement that Germany has also retained and which we must restore here in the United Kingdom.

If Chuka Umunna really wants to be Leader and Prime Minister, as I very much hope that he does once a vacancy arises, then here is a substantial part of his programme. Though Leader and Prime Minister of and for which party is now dependent on how well, if at all, that programme is promoted, developed and, where, possible, implemented in the meantime.

7 comments:

  1. "If Chuka Umunna really wants to be Leader and Prime Minister, as I very much hope that he does once a vacancy arises, then here is a substantial part of his programme. "

    What, is he a reader of yours?

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  2. A lot more than that, by all accounts.

    I wish you were Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, David. This and the Royal Yacht post, dozens like them every week, you have a reach and range that nobody else could match. Plus you would be a brilliant behind the scenes fixer.

    I am not yet sure about a new party, looks like you're not, either. What Labour does with you once your next book is out and several other things are up and running this year will determine by illustration whether or not there needs to be one.

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  3. Umunna is really very good. I can even forgive him for being younger than I am. He is also close to Maurice and that crowd; see yesterday's post about black politics. If 2012 does turn out to be the year when it becomes necessary to make the break, then all eyes would be on him, and deservedly so.

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  4. I had never made the "black" connection as to why Chuka had clicked so well with Blue Labour and very Blue Labour ideas like this one would be if Clegg had not watered it down. It is obvious once you say it, though. But Chuku is not really a social conservative himself, you know.

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  5. Ed Miliband is not remotely a social conservative except, perhaps, in a few cultural ways that almost everyone is. I do not know about Chuka Umanna in those terms, although, while open to correction, I suspect something similar, because most Labour politicians of my own generation are broadly like that. But they have both won the confidence of Blue Labour.

    The defeat of David Miliband by Ed Miliband may be compared to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Barack Obama. A new and better party can now be created. Or, rather, restored. A party for all those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, and a powerful Parliament.

    Not restricted to, but certainly including, those of us who have a no less absolute commitment to any or, as in my case, all of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

    A party for those who are aware of, who understand, who value and who draw on trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement, rejecting economic Marxism as totally as it rejects cultural Marxism. A party for those who, with Herbert Morrison, “have never seen any conflict between Labour and what are known as the middle classes”, and who, with Aneurin Bevan, denounce class war, calling instead for “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon" and for the making of “war upon a system, not upon a class”. A party unencumbered by the ludicrous notion that public provision is, or ever was, supposed to be “a safety net for the poor”, rather than universal.

    The party at the organising centre of the alliance between the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else. The party of the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left’s traditional electoral base.

    A party worthy of the valiant history of opposition to all of Stalinism, Maoism, the Trotskyist distinction without a difference, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Those who have never recanted their former Stalinism, Maoism or Trotskyism, or their former support for those Far Right regimes, admitting that that stance had been wrong at the time, can have no part in such a party.

    Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna, over to you. Or, preferably and plausibly assisted by union money, do we have to do it ourselves?

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  6. Unrepentant Blairite16 January 2012 at 21:22

    With Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna comes Blue Labour, with Blue Labour comes David Lindsay now complete with a family connection to Glasman, and with David Lindsay come the lot: Neil Clark, Rod Liddle, Radical Orthodoxy (leading to Phillip Blond, another Royal Yacht enthusiast), Opus Dei, True Wales, diehard Scottish Unionists, Australian monarchists, American paleocons, Peter Hitchens, pan-Slavists, Syrian Christian anti-interventionists, Palestinian Christian nationalists, the lot.

    With Glasman and London Citizens also comes Lutfur Rahman, who was singled out for special thanks after bussing dozens of Tower Hamlets council staff to Leicester during working hours to secure the election of the man who ran Durham University Labour Club when Lindsay was in it. That new MP has already been made a whip by Ed Miliband.

    There is more and more and more of this stuff. The new party already exists. It has stolen the name of my party. I want my party back. Why do people like Harry's Place never report any of this?

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  7. And as of today we see our brightest young hopes joining the Tories. The David Lindsay Tendency does not need a breakaway party. We do.

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